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Edwin: The services that we provide are largely around providing software licensing reviews for our IT vendors. We also provide to our end clients software asset management services. And we also do a range of other reviews for our clients around their advertising, their media, their royalties and insuring that their third party contracts are performing to the terms and conditions of those contracts.

Maurice: So as a good example of how we’ve used the knowledge of our IT vendors with our clients, particularly with the big 4 banks. One of our big 4 banks have come to us and said “with that knowledge how can you help us understand, across 14 vendors, both from IT and services, the contract risks that we’re exposed to that we’re not aware of, or that we’re aware of and not managing well?

Secondly, how can we understand how we can manage these contracts better to extract more value from that contract? And the last thing, while you’re here, why not look at our procurement practices and get some of your subject matter experts in to help us understand if we can manage our practices much better across our organisation against globally comparative banks?”

Typical clients and typical buyers within our services are the CFO at a very strategic level, so they get a good understanding of what the return on investment is and the bottom line impact to their organisation. We work significantly with heads of procurement, and also with Chief Information Officers, as key buyers because a lot of the suppliers and/or end users are linked to those groups within the business.

Edwin: So there’s two great opportunities that I see in the future: one is helping our clients better manage their software assets. It’s a really high investment for any company in Australia. What we’re looking to do is help them better manage their software, optimise that so they can get a better return on investment. The other area that is really exciting is around expanding our mystery shopping services.

Any of our clients that have a retail distribution network where they want to better understand the customer experience, and want to ensure that their governance and their control is working effectively – we can work to help them. The typical buyers, if there’s a particular compliance lens, then it tends to be the Chief Risk Officer. If, however, it’s got more of a customer experience lens to it, then it tends to be the Chief Marketing Officer, or someone in charge of the retail distribution network.

Maurice: There is an offering here at KPMG that offers an integrated model. In other words, we’re going to be able to cross sell within KPMG to offer our clients a much better solution to improve their third party relationship. The clients are going to get financial benefit: the likelihood of them making a 5 to 1 return, or a 10 to 1 return on fees they pay us is quite high. They’re going to improve their governance arrangements, and they’re going to have much better transparency around their relationships. And as a result, we’re going to improve the way we work with our clients, and have an opportunity to grow this practice even further.